AdamSmith

Every single Senate seat counts loads. As it were!

The good news: This disgusting piece of business looks fairly likely to flip the House back to Pelosi & Co. in 2018, and to considerably narrow the margin in the Senate.

...The stars were all around him as Reinhold descended the little hill. Out at sea, the "Forrestal" was still sweeping the water with her fingers of light, while further along the beach the scaffolding round the "Columbus" had transformed itself into an illuminated Christmas tree. Only the projecting prow of the ship lay like a dark shadow across the stars. A radio was blaring dance music from the living quarters, and unconsciously Reinhold's feet accelerated to the rhythm. He had almost reached the narrow road along the edge of the sands when some premonition, some half-glimpsed movement, made him stop. Puzzled, he glanced from land to sea and back again; it was some little time before he thought of looking at the sky. Then Reinhold Hoffmann knew, as did Konrad Schneider at this same moment, that he had lost his race. And he knew that he had lost it, not by the few weeks or months that he had feared, but by millennia. The huge and silent shadows driving across the stars, more miles above his head than he dared to guess, were as far beyond his little "Columbus" as it surpassed the log canoes of paleolithic man. For a moment that seemed to last forever, Reinhold watched, as all the world was watching, while the great ships descended in their overwhelming majesty--until at last he could hear the faint scream of their passage through the thin air of the stratosphere. He felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away. He had laboured to take men to the stars, and in the moment of success the stars--the aloof, indifferent stars--had come to him. This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen parent cliffs and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now; only one thought echoed and re-echoed through Reinhold's brain: The human race was no longer alone... Childhood's End

LMAO

The report is still available. https://www.amazon.com/Report-Scientific-Unidentified-flying-Objects/dp/B000Z3UI6S I have the 2.5-inch-thick paperback version. (Thickest paperback I've ever seen, apart from the Signet Paperbacks [I think? maybe Bantam] edition of War and Peace.)

If alien entities had traveled all this way to see us, do you really think they would have spent three hundred years lurking around in the bushes looking for a place to park? Arthur C. Clarke

Lost it many years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Committee The energies of indignation have only so many megajoules available to hurl at these colossal stupidities.

All wildlife should be issued military-grade firearms, and trained in their use. Last year it was reported that across the past 50 years, human presence, one way or another, has eliminated 40% of either the population numbers or the biomass, can't recall which, of all mammalian life on the planet.

I believe @Larstrup was making a light jest about the approaching end of pleasant (read: survivable) environmental conditions for H. sapiens here on Earth.

And then of course...

Trump's approval rating just entered a league of its own President Donald Trump's approval rating sank to a new low in CNN polling on Tuesday, earning the approval of just 35% of Americans less than a year into his first term. That's a significant drop from the 45% approval rating that Trump had in March, shortly after taking office. It marks the worst approval rating in a December of any elected president's first year in the White House by a wide margin — and only the second time since the dawn of modern polling that a president's approval rating sank under 50% at this point. A broad 59% of Americans said they disapprove of how Trump is handling his job as president. George W. Bush ended his first calendar year at 86% approval, John F. Kennedy hit 77%, George H.W. Bush reached 71% and Dwight Eisenhower hit 69%. Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all finished their first calendar year with approval ratings in the mid-to-high 50s... Cont.: http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/19/politics/trump-approval-new-low-history/index.html

?

o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwzjlmBLfrQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Dorfman

The fury of monster fire leaves residents no choice but to flee http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-new-fire-story-20171215-story.html That land is supposed to be dry desert. Ma (to say it again) is simply reverting to the form She intended for it. Before our hubristic meddling.

“The way to understand Trump, I think, is pretty simple,” Chomsky said. “Apart from the pathological megalomania, he is an astute enough politician to understand that his only hope for power is to keep his adoring base in line, and they relish the fact that he is lashing out at those they see as their enemies and persecutors: Muslims, elites, foreigners … Not unknown in history, and not with welcome outcomes.” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/01/meghan-markle-could-shake-up-monarchy-says-noam-chomsky

I agree in whole. The economic disruption this policy change would create is what I think will undo it. Business today depends on the Internet. To have Internet access fucked with in this way will not be tolerated by the Big Businesses -- the retailers, banks, manufacturers, etc etc who depend on it; and whose collective lobbying clout on K Street eclipses that of the telecoms.

Worth a repost...

Speaking as an atheist, I wouldn't count on it.

Robert Serber From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Robert Serber Robert Serber ID badge photo from Los Alamos. Born March 14, 1909 Philadelphia, USA Died June 1, 1997 (aged 88) New York City, USA Alma mater Lehigh University University of Wisconsin–Madison Scientific career Doctoral advisor John Hasbrouck Van Vleck Doctoral students Leon Cooper Influences Eugene Wigner J. Robert Oppenheimer Robert Serber (March 14, 1909 – June 1, 1997) was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. Serber's lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as The Los Alamos Primer. The New York Times called him “the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb.”[1] Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Manhattan Project 3 Post-war work 4 Bibliography 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links Early life and education He was born in Philadelphia as the eldest son of David Serber and Rose Frankel in a Jewish family.[2] He married Charlotte Leof (26 Jul 1911 – 1967) in 1933, the daughter of his stepmother's uncle.[3] Rose Serber died in 1922 and David married Charlotte's cousin Frances Leof in 1928. He earned his B.S. in Engineering Physics from Lehigh University in 1930 and earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with John Van Vleck in 1934, after which he was initially going to begin postdoctorate work at Princeton University with Eugene Wigner. He changed his plans and went to work with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley (and shuttled with Oppenheimer between Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology). In 1938 he took a job at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he stayed until he was recruited for the Manhattan Project. He later became a professor and chair of the physics department at Columbia University. Manhattan Project He was recruited for the Manhattan Project in 1941, and was in Project Alberta on the dropping of the bomb. When the Los Alamos National Laboratory was first organized, Oppenheimer decided not to compartmentalize the technical information among different departments. This increased the effectiveness of the technical workers in problem solving, and emphasized the urgency of the project in their minds, now they knew what they were working on. So it fell to Serber to give a series of lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project. These lectures were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as The Los Alamos Primer, LA-1. It was declassified in 1965, and is available at this Wikipedia page. Serber developed the first good theory of bomb disassembly hydrodynamics. Serber on Tinian in 1945, just before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Serber's wife Charlotte was appointed by Oppenheimer to head the technical library at Los Alamos, where she was the only wartime female section leader.[4] Serber created the code-names for all three design projects, the "Little Boy" (uranium gun), "Thin Man" (plutonium gun), and "Fat Man" (plutonium implosion), according to his reminiscences (1998). The names were based on their design shapes; the "Thin Man" would be a very long device, and the name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel and series of movies of the same name; the "Fat Man" bomb would be round and fat and was named after Sydney Greenstreet's character in The Maltese Falcon (from Hammett's novel). "Little Boy" would come last and be named only to contrast to the "Thin Man" bomb. This differs from the unsupported theory, now abandoned, that "Fat Man" was named after Churchill and "Thin Man" after Roosevelt (see Links). Serber was to go on the camera plane for the Nagasaki mission, "Big Stink", but it left without him when Major Hopkins ordered him off the plane as he had forgotten his parachute, reportedly after the B-29 had already taxied onto the runway. Since Serber was the only crew member who knew how to operate the high-speed camera, Hopkins had to be instructed by radio from Tinian on its use. Serber was with the first American team to enter Hiroshima and Nagasaki to assess the results of the atomic bombing of the two cities. Post-war work In 1948 Serber had to defend himself against anonymous accusations of disloyalty, mostly because his wife Charlotte's family were Jewish intellectuals with Socialist leanings, and also because he tried to remove politics from discussions of the feasibility of the fusion bomb, leading to arguments with Edward Teller.[5] Serber went on to be consultant to numerous labs, businesses, and commissions. In 1972 Serber was awarded the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize.[6][7] Robert Serber is interviewed in the Oscar-nominated documentary, The Day After Trinity (1980). In the 1989 movie dramatization of the Manhattan Project, Fat Man and Little Boy, the role of Robert Serber is played by Dr. H. David Politzer, a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. Politzer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. Serber died June 1, 1997 at his home in Manhattan from complications following surgery for brain cancer.[1] Bibliography Serber, Robert; Crease, Robert P. (1998). Peace & War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-10546-0. Serber, Robert (1992). The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on how to Build an Atomic Bomb. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-07576-4. Original 1943 "LA-1", declassified in 1965, plus commentary and historical introduction. Serber, Robert (1987). Serber Says: About Nuclear Physics. World Scientific. ISBN 978-9971-5-0158-7. Robert Serber 1909—1997 A Biographical Memoir by Robert P. Crease, 2004? Washington. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/serber-robert.pdf References Freeman, Karen, "Robert Serber, 88, Physicist Who Aided Birth of A-Bomb"; The New York Times, June 2, 1997 http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/serber-robert.pdf p.4, 7, 9 http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/serber-robert.pdf p.4 The bomb and its makers Michael Waters, The Librarian Who Guarded the Manhattan Project’s Secrets Walter, Claire (1982). Winners, the blue ribbon encyclopedia of awards. Facts on File Inc. p. 438. ISBN 9780871963864. "Serber is recipient of Oppenheimer Prize". Physics Today. American Institute of Physics. April 1972. doi:10.1063/1.3070824. Retrieved 1 March 2015. Further reading Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (12 February 2004). Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943-1945. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-54117-6. External links 1994 Audio Interview with Robert Serber by Richard Rhodes Voices of the Manhattan Project 1982 Audio Interview with Robert Serber by Martin Sherwin Voices of the Manhattan Project Annotated bibliography for Robert Serber from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues Naming of Fat Man & Thin Man after Churchill, Roosevelt? Oral History interview transcript with Robert Serber 26 November 1996, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives Oral History interview transcript with Robert Serber 10 February 1967, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives Eyewitness Account of the Trinity Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Serber